I’m teaching introductory evolution this quarter, and am using as a textbook Doug Futuyma’s Evolution (second edition, Sinauer). Today’s lecture will be on the maintenance of genetic variation via natural selection (heterosis, etc.), and in the textbook under “frequency dependent selection,” I see this on page 319: Why is the sex ratio about even (1:1) […]
“Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.” —Charles Darwin, Notebooks From Eurekalert we have the description of a new species in a group I didn’t know existed (reference and link to open-access paper below): the forcepflies. Austromerope braziliensis is the newest species described in the family […]
Kelly Houle is this website’s Official Artist and Calligrapher™, and, as you know if you’re a regular, she’s producing an illuminated version of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a project that will contain the entire book in Kelly’s marvelous calligraphy and splendid art. It will take her at least five years, and you’ll know […]
Darwin, unfortunately, was a dog person and seemed to dislike cats. I haven’t been able to find much information on Darwin and felids, and my inquiries to Janet Browne, the preeminent biographer of Darwin, have yielded bupkes. But loyal reader SGM has sent a drawing of a cat that appeared in Darwin’s works (perhaps the […]
by Greg Mayer There have been a number of interesting comments by readers on my post on the recent paper on the radiation of placental mammals by Maureen O’Leary and colleagues. I want to respond briefly to a few of them here. Biogeography. Does this paper imply that the origin and geographic distribution of the […]
I wrote this yesterday—Sunday afternoon, and decided to polish and post it today. ***** Today I fly back to Chicago to begin teaching evolution to undergraduates, and I’ll also begin writing the book that has immersed me so deeply in theology over the last year. This almost certainly means that I’ll have to reduce the […]
by Greg Mayer (Updates below.) A new study just published in Science by Maureen O’Leary and colleagues examines the phylogeny of 40 fossil and 46 extant mammals based on a very large data set of morphological and molecular characters (the latter only from the living taxa). The study has gotten a fair amount of attention […]
by Greg Mayer In today’s Science Times, Carl Zimmer has a nice article on Darwin’s favorite birds, pigeons. “Whoa”, you say, “Pigeons? Don’t you mean finches?” No, pigeons it is. While we’ve grown accustomed to associating Darwin’s name with the 15 or so finches of the Galapagos Archipelago (plus one species on Cocos Island), the […]
Starting today, posting will be light for a while as I’m embarking on the Great Southern Evolution, Atheism, and Barbecue Tour. I plan to resume regular posting around February 11, but am hoping that Greg and Matthew will step into the breach. Here’s another from the “true facts” series of videos: “True facts about leaf […]
UPDATE: See the first comment below: reader SES notes that one can watch the film “The Revisionists” online here (it’s free until February 27), and some PBS stations in America are broadcasting it tonight. The schedule is also at the link. ________________________ If you’ve followed the attempts of American creationists to get evolution of ouf the […]
